No, it means he's saying that all the examples I gave are of people who aren't actually any good at what they do and are interesting only because for a black person to be able to attempt those tasks at all is remarkable.
In all fairness, this describes a lot of lists of "achievements of minority X in field Y". To some extent, it's a natural result of looking for "achievements" from a tiny minority (e.g. Turks or whatever) in a field where they don't really have a comparative advantage.
Eugene is saying not that "they don't really have a comparative advantage", but that they have a comparative disadvantage so strong that any purported great achievements should be dismissed as fakery, exaggeration, or, if it seems that one of them really has achieved something, "exceptions". In Eugene's view, they're still nothing more than performing dogs, they've just managed the miracle, despite their intrinsic inferiority, of doing it as well as the best real people.
No, it means he's saying that all the examples I gave are of people who aren't actually any good at what they do and are interesting only because for a black person to be able to attempt those tasks at all is remarkable. The stupidity and obnoxiousness of that doesn't depend on a comparison with animals.
In any case, one reason why people use metaphors is precisely the fact that the literal sense of the metaphor produces an effect. You call someone a "dancing bear", and your readers are going to get a mental image of a dancing bear and (in so far as they accept what you say) associate it with the person you're talking about. You don't get to do that and claim you're not comparing the person to an animal.
[EDITED to fix a trivial typo.]
BTW, the original, sourceable quotation uses the image of "a dog walking on its hind legs". Your response still applies.
Full marks for the pep talk, but the prescription of "planning" is surely only part of what is needed. How would you handle the planning fallacy? I don't think "better planning" is the answer.
Oil prices have recently fallen to near record lows. What are the risks and benefits?
Risks:
Benefits:
Debatable:
Any important dynamics I'm missing?
Any important dynamics I'm missing?
Saudi Arabia flooded the market in order to reduce the price, in order to combat the benefit to Iran of the raising of sanctions.
If you make the run lengths increase exponentially instead of linearly then you get O(k) unconditionally.
I know. I was improving the constant factor.
No. But you can't do better than O(k) anyways, and you can do O(k) deterministically.
Randomising the length of the first step will improve on the constant factor by about 2. Similar analysis to the non-adversarial case, and with the same ETA I just added to my earlier comment.
Yeah, I guess LW rationality should be filed under "intellectual fads" rather than "cults".
What are the dynamics that produce a fad rather than growth into the mainstream? It might be worth CFAR thinking about that.
EA doesn't do that kind of thing.
Ipse dixit and motivated reasoning.
Why not just be absolutely anonymous?
Why not just be absolutely anonymous?
Accountability matters.
Whomever downvoted this, can you explain what's so bad about looking at a map before you go to directions unknown? Maps are simple to use AND provide useful information. There's no reason not to use a map.
It wasn't me, but at a guess I'd say, irrelevance to the subject of the post. Which is not about how to find a hotel.
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
That's definitely true. The planning fallacy is a huge issue, and I don't address it here when I talk about plans to reach your goals.
I think finding the motivation to get things done is also a central part of the "achieving goals" target.
I'd like to try and address both of those in some form or another. Do you feel the essay would be strengthened if I added it in passing, or devoted smaller, separate pieces to cover those two?
I think there's an overemphasis on planning in more and more detail. Some things are opaque at the point of making the plan. For example, some parts of a plan may require you do to things you don't know how to do. That breaks down into (1) find out how, and (2) do it. But you don't know what you're going to find, and what acting on you find will look like. (2) is opaque at the planning stage, and may not even exist if the answer to (1) suggests a different way of going about the parent goal.
Also, things can go wrong during execution. No complicated car repair ever goes exactly as the Haynes manual says, and for all the convenience of satnavs, you sometimes have to notice that it's sending you along a stupid route.
I recently had the goal of taking a piece of software I wrote in 100,000 lines of C++ and getting it to be callable from a web page, returning results to be embedded into the same web page, and running on a web server that it had never been compiled for before, starting from a position of knowing nothing about how to do dynamic web pages. It got done, but a plan would have looked like "1. Find a suitable technology for doing dynamic web pages. 2. Use it."